BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aspera, Inc. (http://www.asperasoft.com/),
creators of next-generation software technologies that move the world’s
large data at maximum speed, have announced the results of a joint
research project with Intel Corporation to investigate high-speed
(10Gbps and beyond) data transfer solutions built upon Intel® Xeon®
processor E5-2600 product family-based systems and Aspera’s fasp (http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/fasp/)
transport technology.

The results published in a joint Aspera and Intel whitepaper show
superior Aspera transfer performance on Intel platforms equipped with
the novel Intel® Data Direct I/O Technology (Intel® DDIO) which allows
Intel® Ethernet controllers to route I/O traffic directly to the
processor cache and built-in support for Single-Root I/O Virtualization
(SR-IOV) including approximately the same throughput in both virtualized
and physical computing environments:

· 300 percent throughput improvement versus a baseline system that did
not contain support for Intel® DDIO and SR-IOV, showing the clear
advantages of Intel’s innovative Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product
family.

· Similar results across both LAN and WAN transfers confirming that
Aspera fasp transfer performance is independent of network latency and
robust to packet loss on the network.

· Approximately the same throughput for both physical and virtualized
computing environments.

One of the major challenges in high performance cloud computing is the
capability of moving big data in and out of the backend data center,
especially across increasingly virtualized environments. Today
high-performance servers and hardware are already deployable inside the
data center, and WAN bandwidth can be provisioned beyond multi-Gbps.
Unfortunately existing transport technology lacks the capability of
fully utilizing the end-to-end capacity provided by underlying hardware
platform, particularly over the wide area and traditional host system
architectures limit per-packet processing to sub 10Gbps speeds. Intel
and Aspera are collaborating to address and eliminate both bottlenecks.

Aspera’s fasp transport technology was created to overcome the
bottlenecks of traditional transport protocols in moving large data over
the wide area network. Aspera fasp has no theoretical throughput limit,
and is practically constrained by the available network bandwidth and
the hardware resources at both ends of the transfers.

Intel® DDIO and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) technologies were
designed to deliver superior I/O throughput, and SR-IOV allows virtual
machine platforms to bypass the hypervisor in order to directly access
resources on the physical network interface for superior I/O performance
particularly important for high-throughput large data transfer.

The goal of the project was to show the performance advantages expected
for Aspera fasp transfers running on and Intel Xeon processor E5-2600
product family-based system in virtualized computing environments
typical of cloud computing platforms.

Initial benchmark tests compared the performance of Aspera transfers on
a high-performance Intel system versus a similar system that did not
support Intel® DDIO. Additional tests focused on data transfer over a 10
Gigabit Intel® Ethernet connection between high-end Intel systems with
built-in support for SR-IOV, and similar tests over WAN connection with
varying degrees of latency (50ms – 500ms) and packet loss (0.1% - 5%).

Results confirmed the same transfer performance on WAN as LAN showing
Aspera’s loss and delay tolerance, demonstrated a 300 percent throughput
improvement versus a baseline system without SR-IOV and approximately
the same throughput on virtual hosts enabled with Intel DDIO.

Aspera is the creator of next-generation transport technologies that
move the world’s data at maximum speed regardless of file size, transfer
distance and network conditions. Based on its patented fasp™ protocol,
Aspera software fully utilizes existing infrastructures to deliver the
fastest, most predictable file-transfer experience. Aspera’s core
technology delivers unprecedented control over bandwidth, complete
security and uncompromising reliability. More than 2000 organizations
across a variety of industries on six continents rely on Aspera software
for the business-critical transport of their digital assets.

Please visit www.asperasoft.com and follow us on Twitter @asperasoft for
more information.